Sunday, 11 May 2014

#43: The Keep Of The Lich-Lord

THE KEEP OF THE LICH-LORD

Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson

Reviewed by Mark Lain

The combined gamebook
achievements of Morris (Blood Sword, Fabled
Lands, Virtual Reality, etc) and
Thomson (Falcon, Way Of The Tiger,
DuelMaster, etc) are not to be under-estimated and the prospect of a
co-written FF by them both is a mouth-watering one. This is Dave Morris’ only
completed/published FF entry, whilst Jamie Thomson had previously brought us
(with Mark Smith) two impressive FFs: #11
Talisman Of Death and #20 Sword Of The
Samurai. Expectation is high, then, for what should be a brilliant book,
considering the talent and pedigree of the writers.

I always like
to glance at the Adventure Sheet before I start ploughing through the rules so
that I can prepare myself for any interesting or confusing new stats or
mechanics to contend with and there is nothing new on this one, which suggests
a conventional old-style FF (unusual for a later release.) However, on reading
the rules we discover TWO new stats that are nowhere to be seen on the
Adventure Sheet which means you need somewhere else to keep track of them.
Annoying. Even more annoying is that it quickly becomes apparent that bothering
to record these extra stats is a complete waste of time as they are highly
unlikely to have any bearing on anything! Resolve is another name for concepts
we have seen in other FFs such as Fear, Faith, Willpower, etc and is your
ability to hold fast when faced with the Undead rather than freaking out and
not being able to do anything useful. On first reading the explanation in the
intro, it seems that this might be out to scupper you pretty quickly – roll one
die and add 5 (ie the highest this can go is 11) – but when you read on, the
cracks start to show through. When you have to Test Your Resolve, you need to roll
under your Resolve on two dice. With a ceiling score of 11 this seems quite
tough, but you then get to increase
your Resolve by one point every time you are successful. Conversely, you have
to reduce it by one if you fail, but
the odds are definitely in your favour once you start getting a few lucky rolls
and it goes up, or if you start with a high Resolve anyway. To make things a
bit easier, your Resolve can never drop below 2, but it can exceed your Initial Resolve, finally being capped-off at a
maximum of 12. As Resolve tests are fairly common, it won’t take very long to
reach a Resolve of 12, which makes any further rolls against it redundant (or
it might even be effectively redundant from the outset if you start on 11) and
therefore takes away the element of terror and uncertainty when faced with the
Undead (which is presumably what Resolve was designed to highlight.) The second
new, and even more badly exploited, stat is your Alarm Value. This only comes
into play once you have reached the final stage (Bloodrise Keep) and tracks how
much unwanted attention you are drawing to yourself as you try to find the main
baddie. A good idea in principal, especially as the Undead in this adventure
are a sort of collective consciousness that die if their leader dies so you would
assume they will know if any of their number is being attacked, but it is
highly unlikely that your Alarm Value will increase enough to cause you any
real problems and there is only one (literally) life or death checkpoint where
it will make any real difference to you, and even that is easily avoided. These
stats were evidently designed to add foreboding in the environment and a sense
of care/urgency to your actions, but they are both so easy to survive that they
are rendered almost completely ineffectual.

...And therein
lies the root of this book’s (only real) problem: it is just too damn easy and
makes the FFs that are regarded as uncharacteristically straightforward (in
particular #29 Midnight Rogue, #3 The Forest
Of Doom and #34 Stealer Of Souls)
actually seem like a challenge. In KotLL pretty
much everything is laid at your feet and you do actually have to make quite an
effort to fail:

·Moments
where, in other FFs, you would almost certainly expect to die instantly, only
result in slight chafing here (eg: being hit full-on with an arrow causes -2 St,
as opposed to being fatal, which in reality it probably would be!)

·You
can very quickly acquire various weapons to make you extra-dangerous in battle:
your sword can be sharpened to always inflict -3 St in combat, you can find a
spear that always does double damage to Undead AND a shield that reduces Undead
foes’ Skills by 1 (which, in an adventure where most of the encounters are with
the Undead, is a bit over-lenient!)

·A
particular route can lead to you having a Luck of 16, which makes Luck tests
frankly ridiculous

·There
are only 17 instant deaths, almost all of which are for doing bloody stupid
things that you would be unlikely to attempt (or by failing Luck tests, which
you will struggle to manage to do once you reach the stages where failure
becomes fatal)

·If
having a potential Luck of 16 and superhero-type weaponry at your disposal isn’t
enough, there are umpteen opportunities to improve/replenish your stats
(including several increases of your all-important Resolve score)

·There
is very little combat needed in the early stages and it is possible to get to
the end with still only a handful of encounters that can only be resolved with
a fight

·There
are three different ways to kill the end baddie, all of which are mutually
exclusive, and two of which will just kill him outright without the need for
combat, Luck tests, or in fact anything that would constitute an effort to
prove yourself

·There
are no essential items that success or failure will be dependent on. OK, there
are some items that will make life easier for you, but it’s not as if it’s
going to be particularly hard here anyway!

·Finding
the end baddie is very easy. He is in two different possible locations, based
purely on which way you go, but hiding isn’t his strongpoint and he comes to
you whatever you do so you don’t have to search very hard for either of his locations
(and failing the only important Alarm Value check will only kill you outright
in one of these places)

·There
is no true path, primarily due to the absence of any key items, yet it is also
possible to visit almost every location (bar the battle site, where nothing
happens anyway) on the way to the final section should you feel inclined.
Alternatively, you can take the shortest possible route (which will have no
comparative effect on your chances of success) and finish the book in just over
35 paragraphs, making it also potentially extremely short

·Although
everything that you can buy here is unusually expensive (min 25/30 gp for the
cheapest stuff, rising to 60/70 for some classier items – er, none of which you
really need, of course), the book is very generous in terms of giving you large
stashes of money along the way, plus you start out with 25 gp anyway

·The
most successful set-piece of this book takes place in a graveyard which houses
a nest of vampires that are terrorising a local village. If you choose to visit
it you would anticipate that surviving this is not going to be an easy task. However,
in KotLL even a vampire infestation
is easily sorted out as you can take either one or two NPC companions with you
(who hate each other, to add a bit of tetchy interplay to the proceedings) and you
can let them do some of the fighting for you. Add to this the fact that, even
though you are racing to find the vampires before sun-down, there’s a very good
chance that you will find them as they can be found in at least three different locations
(each of which will have different effects on them), removing the thrill of the
chase somewhat

On the plus
side, the vampire cameo is just one of a large number of (optional) sections of
this adventure that really make it come alive and it is through vivid writing,
combined with genuinely worthwhile things to see and do, that this book really deserves
to be played and re-played, not to try to win (which will disappoint and take
no effort at all), but to experience just how much colour and atmosphere has
been written into it. Everywhere you go (bar the non-event that is the battle
site) there is a game-within-a-game for you to play, be it vampire-hunting,
ridding a village of a bizarre beast that is eating the inhabitants, foiling a
pirate slave ring, visiting a safe-haven woodland full of refugees, discovering
the remnants of a long-dead ancient race, or infiltrating the keep where the
main baddie is holed-up. Anyone who has ever played any of Dave Morris’ Blood Sword gamebooks will be familiar with
his use of extremely evocative language, lengthy descriptive paragraphs, and an
atmosphere of foreboding that starts mysteriously and then grows ever more
oppressive as the game progresses. Morris and Thompson’s books are often quite
complex in vocabulary terms and also in design and are aimed at more mature
readers, but this makes for a very immersive experience and the environment in KotLL is very well constructed. Much
thought has gone into both the back story to current events and also the
history of the setting in general and you really do feel this world as you
discover its past and present along the way (there are even two locations with
National Trust-style explanatory commemorative plaques telling you all about
what happened there!)

The actual
mission here is to rid an island (Stayng Island off the far east of Khul) of an
undead necromancer (the luridly-named Lord Mortis) who has been
accidentally-deliberately re-animated after 200 years lying dormant and has made
short work of turning many of the island’s inhabitants into his undead minions.
He has already taken the Northern part of the island based around Bloodrise
Keep (where he has imprisoned the island’s former Castellan) and YOU are a
mercenary hired to kill him off. Yes, this is fundamentally another
lunatic-of-the-week effort where all you need to do is assassinate the madman,
but there is far more depth to it than just that and, for once, your character
comes across all the way through the book as simply being in it for the money,
rather than as a do-gooder, which perfectly suits the idea that you are a
mercenary. There is a sub-plot where Chaos Pirates are working with Mortis to
enslave the locals to make capturing the island easier, and many people are
leaving while they still can (via your initial landing point.) You discover a
sort of Elven resistance movement (who’s demi-God just happens to be in
Bloodrise Keep as well) and you also have to deal with a traitor situation,
your handling of which will affect what happens when you reach the Keep (well, a
little bit anyway.) The aforementioned optional Vampire hunt is actually to
despatch Mortis’ wife (Lady Lotmora), which adds a sense of anticipation and
acts as a support act to the main event of bumping Mortis himself off, plus you
can visit his (empty) tomb to get an idea of what to expect when you find him (and
also to get one of the two different items that can kill him without you having
to lift a finger.) A really inventive moment comes when you visit a temple that
is an archaeological remnant of an ancient civilisation that once lived in the
island. The main item you take from there is the Elixer Of Lhyss, the effects
of which are different based on your die roll when you drink it – the result can
be good or bad (there are three outcomes) which adds an element of surprise on
re-plays and is a nice change to the usual situation with drinks in FFs where
you are normally totally at the mercy of the writer’s generosity or sadism.

The logical yet multi-layered premise (which is not all presented on a plate, but
rather, unfolds as you discover parts of it) gains extra credence from its
encounters. As the island is being over-run with Undead, most of what you meet
is exactly that and this is what you would anticipate from the restrictive
environment of an island. There are more “normal” people in the untouched South
than the already devastated North, and the further you progress, the nastier
your foes become. Combat encounters are fairly sparse, but those that you come
up against are interesting and in context, if sometimes a little bit weird
(Werewight, Whipperwolf, Skull Beast, etc.) The Keep itself also has a lot of
cannon-fodder Skeletons and the like which, again, makes sense, as it’s the
garrison for Mortis’ undead army.

There is a
minor structural criticism in that there are a lot of “cut-and-paste” sections
but, as these deal with alternate versions of the same thing (eg: whether you
have one or two companions in the graveyard, or whether you spend too long
getting to the quayside), this is forgivable as it avoids the problem you
sometimes find in FFs of having/doing something that is impossible based on the
route you have taken to reach that point. There are also a few “knowing” inter-textual
references where you find pubs called the “Sword of the Samurai” and “Down
Among the Dead Men” which are cute but also a little bit pretentious (although
there is nothing wrong with product placement on the authors’ behalves!) Rather
more cleverly, you can find a stat-boosting sword (if already potentially
having a razor-sharp one is not enough for you) that was made in Hachiman (the
setting for Sword of the Samurai) and
I always like to see evidence of cross-referencing to aid the creation of a
global FF world. There is a grating aspect as well, though, which suggests that
the adventure had been re-thought at some point during its creation, in that
the overall island group and its Alliance changes its name part-way through,
but you may or may not even notice this. Also, you are given what the book
calls a very important ring (the Ring of Communing) by your sponsor at the
start and you would be forgiven for thinking this will prove pivotal in the
adventure. Sadly, it has no real impact on anything (you can even lose it and
it makes no difference), other than to give you a semi-useful clue to beating
Mortis at the end. For the most part, you just find yourself getting yelled-at for
using it at the wrong times and, in one of the few moments of bad continuity,
it works in paragraph 400 regardless of whether a) it has any charges left in
it, or b) you even still have it!

A book with
such well-rendered atmosphere and theme needs art that is equal to that and
David Gallagher’s internal drawings are very dark, in keeping with the prose.
Monsters are very stark whites on very shadowy backgrounds which make them seem
all the more horrific and there is an intensity to many of the illustrations that
suits this book in my view. The cover is curious as nothing is really happening
on it (the title takes up a lot of the available space), but it shows Lord
Mortis as a huge, almost Napoleonic figure dominating his hordes, which is
subtle yet strangely appropriate.

This book’s
excessive ease is at odds with the atmosphere created and the general themes.
It is very well-designed and exceptionally well-written. Its non-linearity,
with no particular true path, and relative freedom of movement, make a refreshing
change to the usual very specific route you need to normally find in FFs, and
the sheer quality of this book as an adventure (as opposed to a game that you
need to win) raise it well above just being written-off as “far too easy.”
Granted, it is very very simple to beat, but at least there is variety even in
how you can easily beat it! The new stats are a failure when they should have
driven the plot devices, but for once we have a book that can be completed with
low stats, and this entry has so much to offer that, in spite of being stupidly
easy, this is still a great gamebook as well as a great piece of fantasy
fiction.

7 comments:

I agree that it is easy, but I enjoy the fact that I can just explore this world without worrying that I'm going to die at the end. It means that I can repeat this book looking forward to what I am going to find out instead of a sense of frustration that I have to go through the same route because I got killed near the end.

Keep of the Lich Lord is great! Most of the above reasons for the book being easy, I see as strengths - the book doesn't fall into the frustrating Fighting Fantasy tendency of requiring impossible rolls in order to win. Possible to succeed with low stats? Yay! Few frustrating instant death paragraphs? Double yay!

Also, I'm hearing rumours this book may return in an updated format. Copyright apparently remains with Morris and Thomson, rather than it being included with the Fighting Fantasy oeuvre as a whole...

I agree with you too, Paul. A refreshing change for FF, and a great book even if it's very easy. There is an iTunes App available as well https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/the-keep-of-the-lich-lord-hd/id509927813?mt=8

I just got a copy of this along with a few other gamebooks a couple weeks ago but haven't read it yet. The non-linear exploration sounds like a precursor to the Fabled Lands series, which takes the open setpiece concept about as far as it can go in book form.

Morris and Thompson are the best in the biz as far as I'm concerned. They combine the detailed world building skills of Joe Dever with the mechanical flexibility of Steve Jackson and are unafraid to write with a more mature audience in mind.